NEW YORK—“Blood!” says dancer Gabrielle Lamb, showing us her fangs and widening her eyes to prove she is crazy. As Agave, in a modern-dance version of “The Bacchae,” Lamb announces that she thirsts for violence.

She has come to the wrong place. Morphoses, the experimental company directed by Lourdes Lopez, opened “The Bacchae” at the Joyce Theater in New York, on Tuesday. Yet choreographer Luca Veggetti’s distillation of Euripides’ tragedy, in which Dionysus wreaks vengeance on the city of Thebes for refusing to admit his divinity, is dry and bloodless. Lamb’s monologue, with the dancer crouching perched on claw-like hands, is virtually the only moment when someone expresses any passion.

Instead, individuals wander past in a daze of anomie. The piece is so abstract that it requires a leap of faith even to identify the characters.

Presumably Adrian Danchig-Waring is Pentheus, the blasphemous ruler of Thebes, who defies Dionysus and is horribly punished—ripped apart by Agave, his mother, whom the god has blinded with delusional frenzy. Frances Chiaverini must be Dionysus, although her tricky duet with Pentheus merely hints at the king’s attempts to manacle the effeminate stranger who appears in his court. As Danchig-Waring snatches at the air, Chiaverini dodges, sensing where his hands will be before they get there. To indicate that Pentheus has disguised himself as a woman, when the king himself comes embarrassingly under Dionysus’ spell, Danchig-Waring simply removes his trousers.

The passions of Greek drama are completely absent. As Virginia Woolf understood, these passions acquire their shrillness from a life lived in the open air. Yet Woolf also noted in her essay “On Not Knowing Greek” that among the tragedians Euripides is the oblique, psychological one—the one who can be “acted in the mind”—and this interior space is where Veggetti sets his action. Black curtains, fluttering in a breeze, suggest the confines of a mystery cult. People enter and exit by slipping beneath these drapes.

The eight supporting dancers are deployed at angles, fragmenting the space and isolating individuals. Veggetti’s dancers typically display an internal focus, but here their alienation acquires special meaning, signifying the way Dionysus has hoodwinked the populace. The principal antagonists—Danchig-Waring and Chiaverini, or Chiaverini and Lamb—stalk past each other unseeing or echo each other’s gestures at a distance, occupying separate realms of light and shadow.

Other barriers are freely crossed. Flute player Erin Lesser shares the stage with the dancers while they contribute to Paolo Aralla’s ominous sound score by slashing the air and pounding the floor with thyrsus-like wands.

Morphoses, which commissioned this work, began its life as a neo-classical ballet company, but Veggetti’s style is wholly contemporary. His dancers slide nimbly across the stage in stocking feet, swooping without actually leaving the ground. Phrases begin abruptly but taper off slowly, often acquiring an extra burst of energy at the end, an effect that with repetition loses the ability to surprise.

Although the dancing is beautiful and Chiaverini, in particular, has the power to enliven it with unpredictable starts and stops, this “Bacchae” is so far removed from rebellious mortals’ pride and anger that, in the end, the dancing seems irrelevant.